Wurzweiler School of Social Work

WELCOME TO THE REAL CASES PROJECT!

The purpose of the Real Cases Project is to broadly expand knowledge
and skills of students and faculty concerning social work practice in a
public child welfare context. The central elements of the Real Cases
curriculum integration effort are three case studies, drawn from
Administration for Children’s Services’ innovative, agency-wide case
review process. Social work faculty, affiliated with social work
programs throughout the Metropolitan New York Area, wrote thirteen
teaching guides that differentially integrate these cases into plans for
teaching specific courses, including common foundation areas, practice
method/level courses, and key electives. The extensive guides integrate
the cases with course-specific objectives and suggestions for teaching
and evaluation. Leaders from the Administration for Children’s Services
wrote and collected highly useful appendices to illuminate policies and
practices relevant to the cases, and these are linked with the teaching
guides. Our overall evaluation engages both faculty and students in
providing feedback on their experience and outcomes of using the Real
Cases material in the classroom.

Under the umbrella of the New York Social Work Education Consortium,
the Real Cases Project addresses significant concerns about education,
recruitment and retention of workers in this essential field of the
profession, and builds on over 100 years of case study learning in
social work education. Developed through a long-standing and extensive
collaboration among social work educators and child welfare
professionals in New York, the conditions influencing the project’s
development provide a model of community engagement and collaboration.

As a web-based and hard-copy document, the Real Cases Project will be
widely accessible to all programs in our long-standing Consortium. This
local (albeit large-scale) model for child welfare infusion can be
adapted for use in other venues, and the case study based, multi-course
approach is a model for other collaborative, integrative initiatives in
other fields.

In developing the Real Cases Project, we have taken the position that
the effort to connect child welfare and social work education must be
ambitious and creative, bringing together the theory and practice of all
areas of the social work curriculum. The Real Cases approach promotes
public child welfare as an important arena for professional practice,
policy and research, and suggests that students can apply what they
learn in studying other settings to this one, and vice versa. It brings
together diverse groups of faculty and draws inspiration and context
from actual case studies from public child welfare, providing
course-specific methods and resource materials for integrating public
child welfare in social work education without altering existing
curriculum.